Stephanie

“I didn’t want to be in love with you. I didn’t want to believe in love at all. It’s never happened to me before. And to be perfectly frank, I’m still not entirely happy about the whole thing. I think—it’s going to be exhausting. You’re domineering and devious and I’ve noticed that whenever we’re not kissing, I wish we were.” Her voice had grown nearly plaintive; she stopped and cleared her throat. “It’s a damnable situation. I don’t know what to do about it.”
He eyed her from the chair. “I’m pigheaded, too. Pray don’t forget that.”
“Certainly not. It was the next thing I was going to mention.”
“My sweet, your notion of love is unique, to say the least. I wonder that you haven’t written me sonnets already. Something like ‘Ode to the Blackguard.”
― Shana Abé, Queen of Dragons

“All that effort,” he mused, “merely to avoid me. How gratifying.”
― Shana Abé, The Smoke Thief

“I’d dreamed once of a forest of gold, and Jesse had done what he could to give it to me. His bedroom had been transformed into a wonderland of leaves and flowers, pinecones and branches of birch and oak, all of it glimmering, all of it singing. The bed was covered, his chest of drawers, the sill.
Much of it was jumbled together, beautiful for what it was if not its presentation. Jesse had last left this room on the night of his death, right after he’d called to me, right before he’d gone to the castle. So he would have been scattering his final gift in haste, knowing he worked against the clock.
Knowing, somehow, what was to come.
Which meant he’d been making gold for weeks. When I’d seen him so tired, when he’d told me all those nights that we should rest apart…he had been doing this.
For me.
A folded note had been set upon the bed. My name had been scrawled upon it.
I love you was all it said inside.
I sank to the floor. I looked up and all around as the sun danced through the window and turned Jesse’s room into an ambered heaven of song and shimmer and sparks.
That was how Armand found me, hours later. That was what he saw, as well, what he heard, as he walked slowly into the chamber and eased down beside me to rest his back against the bed.
We sat there together, listening, marveling.
In time, his hand reached out and took firm hold of mine.”
― Shana Abe, The Sweetest Dark

“I've wanted you from the moment I first saw you in the museum. Before that. I wanted every part of you from the first time I felt you, your presence. I want you in the sky, and against the earth. I want to kiss you again, I want to touch you, I want to feel you in my arms and I want to hear you gasping my name when I'm inside you. I want all that, and I want it badly. Every time I look at you, I want it. So you're going to have to become used to that, Rue. It won't change."
(Christoff to Rue)”
― Shana Abé, The Smoke Thief